The Great Tribulation continues...
Having fitted a nice swaybacked old B.17 on a home-made clamp, and beaten the cranks straight (many crashes has this one had, mrrmph!), it was time for another go.
Good news: The saddle's great. It actually takes my weight and I can sit there rather than perch. Once I bend the saddle loops out of the way so they don't gut me like a fish on mounting, that will be sorted.
Bad news: On the second spin, the damn thing dumped me
hard - a comedy cradlefall where I tried to stop the machine committing hara-cranky and so hurled my carcass under it, spectacles flying. My left sitbone is as sore as a Hilary Clinton. A small child of unknown provenance retrieved the specs. Wisdom and age both bade me retire to my cave to lick my wounded backside...
The bicycle had what is called the "wabbles," and had them very badly. In order to keep my position, a good many things were required of me, and in every instance the thing required was against nature. That is to say, that whatever the needed thing might be, my nature, habit, and breeding moved me to attempt it in one way, while some immutable and unsuspected law of physics required that it be done in just the other way. I perceived by this how radically and grotesquely wrong had been the life-long education of my body and members.
The steps of one's progress are distinctly marked. At the end of each lesson he knows he has acquired something, and he also knows what that something is, and likewise that it will stay with him. It is not like studying German, where you mull along, in a groping, uncertain way, for thirty years; and at last, just as you think you've got it, they spring the subjunctive on you.
